Rust has been the developer's most loved language for years, according to the Stack Overflow Survey. It is also employed by lots of big tech companies, including Microsoft, Facebook and Dropbox. And it won the title for the sixth year running, So why is it popular amongst developers and big tech companies including Microsoft, Facebook and Dropbox?
What is RUST?
Simply putting it is a statically as well as strongly typed programming language.
Statically typed indicates that all the datatypes that are expressed in the code are known at compile time and memory allocation is done properly.strongly typed indicates that the types are designed to make it harder to write syntactically incorrect code.What is so special about RUST?
Rust is a low-level programming language that's focused on performance and security. It is fast and memory-efficient, with no runtime or garbage collector, which makes it a great solution for embedded and bare-metal development. Its syntax is similar to that of C++. It is an open-source project developed originally at Mozilla Research. In 2021, the Rust Foundation has taken the torch and is driving the development of the language.
Rust solves problems that C/C++ developers have been struggling with for a long time - memory errors and concurrent programming. This is seen as its main benefit. Also growing number of Rust packages at crates.io repository.
The importance of correct memory management becomes immediately apparent when you realize that over the past 12 years around 70% of all security bugs in Microsoft products have been memory safety issues. The same number is also reported for Google Chrome.
Rust’s dual-mode model is one of its biggest advantages. Safe Rust and Unsafe Rust. Safe Rust imposes additional restrictions on the programmer (e.g. object ownership management), thereby ensuring that the code works properly. Unsafe Rust gives the programmer more autonomy (it can operate on raw C-like pointers), but the code may break.
Future of Rust
Rust functions strictly better alternative for C as you can already see a visible pattern of rewrites done in Rust to escape performance degradation in most of these big companies already. Especially, when developments needed that extra performance but want to avoid memory issues associated with C.
But Rust has far more benefits: it makes lower-level programming more accessible, has excellent support for WASM, and is fantastic for concurrency. In the future, you can expect Rust usage to increase as more and more companies discover how it can improve their codebases and the development process.